James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
1
Volume leveling is a sneaky useful feature. Especially with my wife, who’s fussy about music and doesn’t like it too loud and the compression differences across eras can be brutal with my playlists.
But the feature seems not to work particularly well with streaming titles. Is that because they haven’t been scanned? I wonder why Roon doesn’t at least record “scan info” when playing a streaming track so that it has better information. And wouldn’t it be useful to have the ability to manually scan a streaming album so that its volume leveling and wave-form info are available?
Mods: I’d appreciate if this didn’t get recategorized into a feature request. This is about how it currently functions, plus there are no more votes out there for any feature requests and so categorizing as a feature request is, to me, a way of circular filing comments and feedback.
Qobuz have said that they don’t do volume levelling so they likely don’t provide this information to Roon.
Tidal does but my experience in the tidal app has been pretty hit or miss so I wonder if this is an issue with the streaming services rather than Roon?
I guess it’s like you say, Roon could do this on their side but I would have thought this is kind of a value add that the streaming services should be providing.
I also wonder if doing it on the Roon side would require the core to stream every track and wouldn’t that count as a stream? I.e. royalties get paid when you as a user didn’t actually listen to the track.
Qobuz provide leveling info just fine, one can see it in the signal path.
(Maybe sometimes for newly added album it is missing for a short while until analysis is complete)
However, even with mathematical volume leveling the subjective impression of loudness is still not perfect because, e.g., depending on the inherent compression used in the mastering
2 Likes
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
4
I assume that the streaming services provide most of their value add through their own apps.
My thought was that Roon would just do it as it played a track. Presumably if it’s in your library you will eventually play it. So, no extra royalties unless Roon also added a manual scan for streaming albums. Doesn’t seem so bad for the artists anyway unless there is something in the Roon contract with streaming services about disallowing scans.
So maybe it’s just hopeless. But I feel like manually adjusting the volume at the knob still works better, so there must be some room for improvement. And it seems to be streaming tracks where it’s least accurate. Hmmm…
My information was clearly out of date, thanks for that
2 Likes
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
7
Touche! But it does seem that Roon, in other areas, attempts to discern our subjective tastes and cater to them. This could be an area where they could focus on that, or instead provide a way to manually assign the leveling settings.
